Chapter Text
xv.
Sometimes in your dreams you look down and move your foot aside and see you've stepped onto a severed hand again.
Here in the real world, it's only Tuesday. And you can stitch them back on, even if you can't find the original body. That counts for something, doesn't it?
You have an array of arms and hands and fingers in front of you on the counter of the pizza place in Studio 4. Behind you, a Lenard who still has his hand held on by an unraveled stitch is tossing said hand onto the clock, trying to move its hand from anchovies up to pizza. Whatever, not a big deal.
Outside, Pearl is bent down, head tilted in confusion. A potentially bigger deal, especially if the Neighbors freak out and thereby freak her out, but you’ve got this.
“Alright,” you say, holding up one yellow hand, its polyester stuffing threatening to drip out. “Whose is this?”
Everyone raises whatever they have left for arms.
“Which Junebug is missing a —” you bring the hand down to your face to get a better look at it — “left hand?”
“I’m missing a left hand!” A Norman calls.
“Are you a Junebug, Norm?”
“Yeeeeeessss.”
“Noooo,” you sing-song back.
So it goes.
It only takes you threatening to blast a few letters into the ceiling for them to get themselves under control, a marked improvement, and you manage to convince them that standing in a line in front of your chair and waiting to have whatever hand you have at — well, next to you stitched on is loads of fun.
“Gotta lend a hand to get a hand!” they chirp and chime, echoing back and forth to each other, making up new lyrics as they go. You’ve brought your headphones and Walkman in from your truck, so you don’t mind.
Ricky pops out from the utensil drawer besides you, knocking your elbow. He apologizes. Then says your stitching is terrible.
“If it works, it works,” you say. The Lenard in front of you has his wrist facing up as you carve a jagged violet stitch through his skin-that’s-not-skin. “You’re welcome to help if you think you can do better.”
“I’m kinda lacking in the apposable thumbs department.”
“Welp,” you say, giving your needle a particular tug. “Whose fault is that?”
“Mr. Al’s.”
“You could’ve asked him for arms,” you reply, to which the Lenard pipes up in agreement, says he once asked for an extra eye and then got it and didn’t like it so he went back to only having one. Then, “Where did you learn to sew?”
“The army,” you say.
“Oh wow,” Ricky replies dryly. “No wonder we lost.”
You try and flick at his nose without looking up, but he dodges you, slipping back into the utensil drawer. How does he even get around so much? How much of this place was designed with little crevices and pipes for him to slip through?
The thought is actually pretty sweet.
“Did you kill anybody?” Lenard asks, happy as can be.
You look up at him, with that wide, frozen smile and light X where an eye should be.
You didn’t step on a human eye, but you saw it there in the sun-dried grass, once. Close enough to reach out and grab. Wipe the dirt off. But you can’t reattach eyes and the guy who lost it was dead anyway, so you didn’t.
“Wrong thing to ask, huh?” Lenard says eventually.
xvi.
Maybe Ricky was right to like you better drunk, because you’re playing sour piano keys with Arnold and you’re laughing, you’re wrapping a bluebird tie around Norman’s head and you’re laughing, you’re singing old drinking songs and tripping the already-hobbled melodies with your deep, loud, belly-laughter.
And since it fell into my lot
that I should rise and you should not…
Norman is letting his arms flail like a car lot mascot as Arnold bangs on his piano, making these happy, strangled noises as the stuffed cat you bought for him bounces with the force.
The podium in front of you all rattles, but you’re too caught up to notice. In fact, you don’t notice until it rattles the puzzle pieces keeping the light switch pushed down, making them clatter to the floor and gray darkness flood the cardboard walls of the Penthouse like someone’s spilled ink across a browned page.
“Hey!” Norman says, arms still upraised. Arnold hugs his cat to his chest, grunting out something that could’ve been, “Who’s there?”
You hear something that sounds like a punch. Then, a sawing. You stumble off the stage, shifting your weight between your feet in a way that vaguely reminds you of how you’d once walked gingerbread men across your kitchen counter, and pull your flashlight off your belt. A pair of scissors are poking through the cardboard throat of the podium, your light glinting off the blades in-between their rust stains. The blades retract into the corrugated skin, and you hear a familiar grunt and mutter, and then they’re shoved back through again.
“Ricky,” you say, and bend down, your knees hating you, to try and fail to grasp the puzzle piece on the floor. “What on earth are you doing?”
“I tried— agh—”
—blade in—
“—to call you through— gck—”
—blade out—
“—the vending machine, but nobody heard me!”
“The vending machine?” you ask.
“And the kitchen sink! I was yelling in there for five whole minutes!”
You finally set the puzzle piece back in its place, the lights so bright it makes only you blink. “Sorry we couldn’t hear you,” is all you can think to say as you slowly, carefully, push yourself back up, the world threatening to tilt onto its side and make you slide right off it. “Shouldn’t you have some pipes in here?”
“I do. In the vending machine, and the kitchen sink, and the books in the library and in the pool—”
“In the pool?”
“No, in the big Arnold head overlooking the pool. Mr. Al made it like that so I could practice my swan dive. Anyway—” The next words are muffed, because he takes the scissors back into his mouth and starts sawing again. “’meone lef’ a messag’ for you ah the hohel—”
“Hold on, hold on, Ricky, put down the scissors so I can understand you.” You get down on your knees, no, gravity decides to sit you down hard on your ass, but that’s fine, because you need to be down there to reach to the top of the wound Ricky has carved. “Let me just— peel this back—” So you do, and it tears, though not cleanly, so instead of the rough circle Ricky was clearly going for, you make more of a chewed tongue. “There ya go, bud.”
Ricky has to turn his head to poke through.
“What were you saying?” you ask.
“Can I put my arms down?” Norman asks, still sitting on top of the piano.
“Yes, Norm,” you call.
“But I don’t think I want to.”
“Oh my— Do whatever you want,” you huff back, turning your attention back to the sock puppet before you. “What did you say? All I understood was ‘something something hotel.’”
“Some guy called asking for you at the hotel front desk, so I took a message. You know, you really need to get your own phone.”
“Eh,” you wave him off. “I don’t want the government tracking me.” In truth, when your lease was up, you’d looked at your budget for all of five seconds before the shame like ants colonizing your chest made you slam your little notebook shut. Why pay the phone bill when you had nobody to call you anyway?
“The studio is owned by the city, Gordon,” Ricky replies very matter-of-factly; “They already know where you live.”
“And they ain’t getting any more than that.”
Arnold pipes up, excitedly mush-mouthing something from the stage, kitten cradled in his elbow.
“What he say?” you ask.
“He says he’s insulated the Penthouse with a thick coat of clear glue to keep the government’s mind-control rays out.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Ricky says. “When Arnold was first made, Mr. Al tried to help him develop his hand-eye coordination by letting him play on the old family computer. I can type with my nose at 45 bonks per minute, by the way. But to make a long story short, Arnold ended up on some weird chatroom for conspiracy theorists, so Mr. Al had to take it away. Why do you think he only has a cardboard computer up here?”
“Never thought of it that way,” is all you can think to say. Then, the world catches back up to you: “Who left me that message?”
“Some guy named Ted.”
“Why didn’t you lead with that?”
“Do I look like your secretary? I don’t keep track of all the high rollers and social climbers you hang out with,” Ricky snaps back, tossing his head back and forth dramatically.
“Well—” you start to say, but then Ricky cuts you off again:
“I’m kidding, of course. I told him you’ve started going to your NA meetings and he doesn’t need to call you anymore.”
“What?”
Norman chuckles, still on the stage, arms still reaching for the crayon stars. “Gordon always struck me as the type of guy who thinks he’s above taking drugs when really he’s just too scared to try ‘em.”
“Woah, woah, woah, hey—”
Ricky and Arnold both laugh. You feel your face burn, but somehow in a good way.
You quip back, “And what would you know about drugs?”
“One of our special episodes was a drugs PSA,” Ricky says, to which Norman adds, “One time, one of the interns brought in co*ke and got one of my clones to do a line, but we can’t smell so it just sorta packed on like a milk mustache,” over top of him.
“I love soda!” Arnold chimes.
“I’m going to go call Ted back,” you declare, making your voice boom over Arnold asking for a soda for his cat and Norman and Ricky arguing over the intern’s identity. “And you better not have told him any crazy stuff!”
“I would never!” Ricky says. “Don’t you trust me?”
You leave the door open so he can hear you laugh. Unfortunately, that means he can also hear you almost trip over one of the crayons left on the floor.
Let’s skip to the good part: what Ted wants is to bring his grandchildren over to the studio. What you’ll tell Ricky is that it’s not that you don’t trust him, but you can’t trust the other Neighbors, not yet.
The phone hits its cradle with a heavy clank. You sigh, running a hand over your cheek—crap, you forget to shave today, didn’t you?
Ricky stares at from the little fancy box behind the reception desk, looking like he might vomit something up again. “Mhm, mhm,” he makes those thoughtful noises. “So we’ve gone two weeks without any Stenographer use, we’re halfway through filming season one, aaaand it’s only, what, four kids? A perfectly supervise-able amount of kids?”
“It’s not the right time,” you say.
“Well, got anymore goal posts you want to move, since we’ve apparently got so much extra time?”
“Ricky.”
“Gordon.”
“We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
“Will hungover Gordon really have a different opinion from drunk Gordon?”
“Just—” you raise your hand, put it back down. “Not yet.”
Ricky looks at you for what feels like an eternity, mouth-seam a harsh line, before he pulls himself back into the box. Pops back out, says, “If you’re just embarrassed to be seen with us, just say that.” Pops back in.
“Ricky—”
And out again. “Or take some of that liquid courage and let me handle the tour. I’ve done it hundreds of times before.”
“I’m not getting drunk in front of a bunch of kids.”
“Why not? Scared someone might get the wrong idea and think you’re actually fun to be around?”
“Now you listen here—”
But this time he’s actually gone.
xvii.
Is it sad in a sad way or in a pathetic way that you keep the memories long past the point you're embarrassed by them? Crumbled like leaves from the force of your grip, but when they unfold, the wrinkles all come right out.
God, you’re really gonna be like this for the rest of your life, aren’t you? You only ever used to re-realize this every five or ten years or so.
If you’d known they would make you remember so much, you might have just turned your car around and left.
xviii.
You find Ricky in the projection room the next day—you’d meant to bring Gobblette the rest of your lunch, a sandwich delivered lukewarm and with too much mayo, and found her in the theater, watching some rerun of a classic My Friendly Neighborhood episode.
“Who’s up there?” you’d ask, as though she could answer beyond pointing her salt-shaker fingers up towards the tiny smudge of a sentient sock up in the window. When you climb your way up the stairs to the projection room, huffing more than you’d feel comfortable mentioning, the screen is showing Junebug with a human woman in a yellow shirt and a green bandana over her hair, making a little house out of toast and peanut butter and fruit.
“Mama! Mama! Can you show me how to cut the banana?”
You still can’t help but cringe, just a little.
Ricky is watching, resting his chin on a stack of film reels.
“Apparently the intern with the drug problem was the one who brought us our coffee and bagels this day of filming,” he says without looking at you. You pull out the rolling chair and sit down.
“You don’t strike me as a coffee drinker,” you reply. On the screen, Junebug is reminding kids of the importance of having an adult to handle all your sharp objects.
“Oh no, blegh. Makes me glad I won’t grow up.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Mr. Al always said when I was grown up, I’d understand things like liking coffee or that cognac you drink. I’d always say, ‘No thanks!’ How am I supposed to grow, anyway? Gonna stitch another sock onto me?’”
“I could take ya in two hands and pull on ya until your fabric’s all stretched out.”
“Uh, no. I’m plenty long already.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Ricky looks back to the screen, and so do you, as Junebug and her “mama” begin to eat little toast houses together.
Oh, do you hate it. “Shouldn’t—” you fidget uncomfortably in your chair, fingers tight on the armrest, and ask, “Shouldn’t we tell the puppets they don’t have parents? I mean, isn’t it cruel to let them think they have moms and dads out there waiting for ‘em?”
Ricky looks at you out the corners of his ping-pong eyes. “I mean, wouldn’t it be equally as cruel to tell them ‘Oh, hey, big news! Your memories are all lies!’” His voice lowers. “You really think some of them didn’t figure it out?”
The Unfriendlies, with human teeth in their mouths and dirt deep in their felt and claw marks over what used to be their eyes.
You give a grunt of agreement.
“Besides, the Neighbors aren’t too torn up about it right now.”
“One of the Junebugs tried to get me to drive her to Florida.”
“Well, did you?”
You scoff.
“See? No harm, no foul,” Ricky says. He looks back to the screen: it’s a new scene with him and Ray, an old capture of Ricky asking him how he’s going to clean up all of this sewage.
“Mr. Al and Miss Jane always said we were their kids,” Ricky continues. “But I never asked whether we were, uh, really their first choice.”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to.”
“Yeee-pah,” Ricky replies, popping his lips. Then, watching you from the corner of his eyes: “So did you come to duke it out with me again or are we just chatting?”
“Look, Ricky, I know I upset you pretty bad last night, and I’ve not been really … friendly, the last couple of weeks. But I’ll make it up to you.”
“You’ll make it up to me?” Ricky asks, eyes rattling gently to gaze over at you.
“Well, more like we’ll split it down the middle, but — but, listen, I’ll set up an interview to promote the show, someplace local and nice, and if everything goes well, I’ll let Ted’s grandkids come for a visit.”
“The first of many, of course.”
“If you guys can hold it together.”
“We are held together quite well by only the finest polyester thread and superglue!”
“Ricky, c’mon now. And about half the puppets here are more held together by that old roll of tape I found under the sink.”
Ricky turns to appraise you fully. “You really mean you’ll let some kids come tour the studio?”
“Of course! I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“That’s true; you’re far too much of a grumbly-grouch for it.”
“Rick.”
“I mean it as a compliment.”
You ruffle the three strands of red string he calls hair and shake your head.
On screen, Mr. Al walks into a room. From the elevator that took you up from the depths of the sewers, where the Unfriendlies hung themselves from the rafters and watched you fight the Amalgamation with their scratched-out eyes. He sits down and picks a piece of paper off his desk. He looks broken down; you recognize that look anywhere.
“Dear children,” he begins, and Ricky turns away from you, staring with those eyes that Al made to never blink. “I am sorry to announce that this will be our final episode. I wanted to take a moment to address you personally, so that you may have a final lesson to remember after we’re gone…”
You settle down into your seat like you’ve been caught.
You don’t want to tell Ricky how you found the letter in his —dad’s? creator’s?—hands after you beat the Amalgamation. You’d left it on the table, your own hands shaking with adrenaline, your brow heavy with sweat, all those lights focused now and until forever on an empty black chair.
Well, maybe you should go cut the lamps off. No use wasting energy.
You also don’t want to tell Ricky what you’d thought of the letter: a sinking, confused feeling, a wrongness—
“The world is broken, and we’re broken, too. Our hearts are hollow and dark—unfriendly…”
“…And there is nothing in this world that can fix us—"
Christ, as you hear Al read it all out now, with all the thickness and broken ends of words that only come when you’re holding in tears that you know you’ll never be able to shed, it’s worse.
Jesus, man, you think, these are preschoolers.
If it weren’t for the last paragraph about love and light, you’d have thought this guy was going to blow his brains out on live TV.
You say none of this, of course. You let Ricky watch it, watching him nod sagely as he watches, watching the end of his body disappear in the darkness of another tube built into the desk—wondering if Mr. Al made that so that Ricky could come up here and watch movies with him from the best seat in the house.
“Why would you wanna watch this episode out of all of them?” you ask.
Ricky makes a little noise and twists his head, his version of a shrug. “I dunno,” he says. “Maybe it’s to remind myself why I’m still doing all of this.” He looks back to the screen, the lights in that dark, barren room so bright they cut rectangles out of his eyes. “Maybe I just like hearing his voice.”
xix.
…
…
…
There’s isn’t an easy way to talk about this next part. Neither you nor Ricky will remember how it got to that point, the little irrelevant conversation over Mr. Al’s cognac, tiny bickerings over lunch or a fix or an episode being smoothed over. In fact, the few days in-between watching Mr. Al’s final speech and finding his body will be collapsed in both of your minds, the memory beheaded.
And the wound starts when you find the little button under his desk. “Oh, there’s a button under here,” you say, having caught the edge of its base with your fingers. You’re inspecting the drawers of Mr. Al’s executive desk, his portrait watching you from the corner of its eyes with a friendly, awkward smile. Ricky is sitting underneath his own portrait across the room, the parody — no, pastiche, Gordon, it means a parody with love—of Sir Frederic Leighton’s Flaming June. The end of him is, of course, stuffed into the couch cushion.
What are you hiding in there? you’d asked with a liquor-warmth in your voice and face, stealing towards Ricky to rip the cushion up and finally expose him, but he’d yelled so loudly his voice had cracked in fear. That had stopped you.
Now you’re looking for a key to the desk so you can see if you can find a pen and pad. Ricky has an idea for a song he wants to write down.
“Really?” Ricky asks. “Maybe it’s a security button. You did say Curt freaked out when you came in here.”
“Curt?”
“Y’know, Curt, Curt-n-Call, Curtain Call. Get it?”
“Wow,” you say, blandly. “So that thing is for security?”
“No, no, he was for one of Mr. Al’s passion projects, The Shadow Sapphire—it was this huge production, because Mr. Al wanted to break out into darker stuff, you know things older kids would like, dark fantasy with prophecies and politics and all of that stuff. Huge flop, though, it really hurt him bad…”
You push the button as he rambles on. Something to your right groans with unwilling life, swings open, and a few moth-eaten rags drop softly onto the floor.
You smell it. Faintly, but you smell it.
“What the heck?” Ricky’s voice.
You grope for your gun on top of the desk, a light scrape on the polished wood as you drag it towards your side.
“Gordon?”
“That’s a body, Ricky. Don’t you smell it?”
You’d know the smell of a body if they ripped each of your senses out one by one—it’s hung so hot and thick in the air before that you’d felt it biting at your eyeballs, sitting heavy on the back of your tongue.
Every muscle in your body is awakened with an ancient duty, and you’re moving towards the new, dark hole in the wall before you hear Ricky calling for you to wait, take him with you.
“You sure?”
He is.
You politely look away as Ricky inches like a caterpillar up the branch of your arm, resting light on your shoulder. You hold him gently in place as you climb into the stone enclave behind Mr. Al’s portrait, your other hand, still clutching the Stenographer, cracking open hollow, dried bodies of God knows what kinds of bugs.
EPISODE TITLE: RICKY’S BAD DAY
INT. DUSK.
LIGHTS UP on Mr. Al’s private panic room, largely used for extra storage. Behold! Boxes and metal lockers and some paintings leaned against the wall and a mirror that’s turned around. In the middle of the room is not the worst body Gordon has ever seen in real life, nor Ricky on TV. There are bones and rotted bites of rope and a dark brown stain on the floor that looks tacky to the touch.
It's been a decade, what do you expect?
Still, RICKY tries to scream, but GORDON instantly grabs his mouth and holds it closed. Ricky is right in his ear, after all. RICKY jerks so violently, he falls off Gordon’s shoulder, landing with a yelp. He rushes towards what’s left of Mr. Al, his soft underside catching on the splinters and un-flush nails, but he doesn’t care.
Gordon finally gets a good look at where Ricky ends; he’s just a regular sock all the way down.
GORDON takes a step forward, almost starts to tell Ricky not to touch anything, but Ricky stops on his own.
There’s a long quiet where the only part of Ricky’s mind that’s working is a tiny, buried voice asking where’s the soundtrack? How is the audience supposed to know how to feel if the only sounds are Gordon’s breathing and the rumble and thin squeals of cars stopping and starting outside?
Then, suddenly:
RICKY
So this is where he ended up, huh?
GORDON
Ricky, I’m sorry.
RICKY shakes his head, staring at the skull before him, half-rotted and dusted with this thick, white rash. The skin is dried out and tanned like leather, and the rest of the body is more or less the same, bones with darkened ropes of sinew keeping a few together, everywhere that gross white spread around like cream creese over a bagel.
RICKY looks away, shakes his head again.
GORDON steps forward once, then stops.
GORDON
Ricky, do you, uh, need to go outside?
RICKY
(shakes his head again, has to try twice to speak before he can, his voice thick and low and stuck)
I've never been envious of human's ability to cry before. My dad is dead and I can't even cry over him, just stare at him with these stupid ping pong balls he made into eyes.
GORDON doesn’t say anything.
(a joyless laugh)
My dad is dead!
(Another, louder laugh.)
My dad is dead and no one knows except for a sock puppet and some guy who doesn’t even like puppets!
RICKY turns to face Gordon, who is standing there with an unreadable face Ricky assumes must be pity.
RICKY (CONT.)
Come on, Gordon! You got tear ducts, don't you? Cry a little for us! Least someone could do for poor ole Mr. A, killing himself alone here in this cramped, tiny room with no one to mourn him for ten whole years! Don't have any pennies, do ya Gordon? Dad's probably still waiting on the banks of the Styx without anything for a bus ticket home, and I would give him something but—well, darn, I'm just a stupid sock!
GORDON
(haggard)
Ricky—
RICKY
What? I'm just stating facts. You think I'd be just sitting here if I had some arms or legs? Ha! I could’ve—well, maybe I could’ve stopped it, maybe I could’ve been cutting him down!
GORDON
Okay, Ricky—
RICKY
(with a laugh that sounds like a sob)
What? It's funny! This is just like what you'd see in the movies! Cruel and sad and so patently absurd it's hilarious. Why aren't you laughing, Gordon? Ha! If you aren't gonna cry for me then you might as well start laughing!
GORDON
Ricky, I think you need to leave. Look, just come outside with me, and I’ll go get some trash bags and—
To make a long story short, RICKY tries to put himself on what’s left of MR. AL’s hand, asks GORDON to just let him with a startlingly mundanity.
To make a long story even shorter, exit GORDON and RICKY to go get some trash bags.
[ You use your gardening gloves and double-bag the evidence, Ricky sitting outside waiting for you under his portrait. You feel nothing but a sense of resigned duty, but still, you look between the bones as much as you can, look at your hands and not what they’re holding. It’s happening again. Just your luck, wouldn’t it?
In the corner, that puppet pastiche of Saturn Eating His Son looks for you.]
What to do? More importantly, where to bury him—in this lot, where even the statues will move? What if the dogs smell something of him under the dirt and dig for their old master?
You imagine the news reports, the ratings, the vultures. The police canvasing the scene with guns calling siren-songs out to them whenever a Neighbor gets too close.
You get down on one knee and ask Ricky, as gently as you can, what he wants to do with the body. Miss Jane was never his wife, but Ricky was the closest he had to a son, seemingly.
Where is Miss Jane? Ricky just says he doesn’t know—she left around season 7.
Back during the War, the helicopters gave priority to the wounded. Now that it’s over, the government is still sending out search parties to find where all the bodies were buried.
Do it here, Ricky replies without looking at you. If he really wanted to leave, he would’ve.
You suppose it makes sense.
xx.
Once, a lifetime ago, you and Jerry helped carry body bags out of an overloaded helicopter. Often, when you picked up one end and started to lift it, you’d feel the weight shift downwards and hear something inside squish. The bodies had been piled up inside the helicopter for so long that merely lowering the exit ramp caused a rush of red-brown to spill out onto the dusty earth, nutrients for the grass that would never grow.
Who knows how long it took. You did most of the work with Jerry, but some of the body bags were small enough to do yourself.
When it was over, you and Jerry and the rest of your detail gathered around a canvas pool to wash off your boots, and all around you were soaked socks and bare feet that had a pinkish hue that only came halfway up the calf. You remember each step, each shift of your weight pressing tiny little rocks into your soles and pressing watery blood out.
xxi.
Ricky wants some kind of coffin, so you take the bagged remains and go down to the workshop in the back of Stage 4, the Fred and Norman you’d taped there still propped up against the wall, still babbling nonsense like babes.
Later. You’ll deal with it later.
This is how you got through the War:
First, accept confusion. Realize knowledge doesn’t solve anything. A few weeks before you were drafted, you thought you knew everything one minute and nothing by nightfall. Now, you know nothing all of the time.
Second, shrink the future down until it could fit on the head of a pin. Maybe smaller than that. The world does not exist beyond the next order. If the guys want to play cards and talk about what they’re going to do when they get home, think of it as playing pretend, the way you used to say you were going to be an astronaut or fight dragons when you were a kid.
Third, just get through it. Either you will break, and the world will move on without you, or you will not, and still the world will be the same. Do your next task. Do another. Just get through it.
Ted asked you the other day (or week, or month, or whatever it was), “Some days it kinda still feels like we’re only just waking up, don’t it?”
What did you even say? Did you make a lame, deflecting joke?
It’s there, in a book you listened to once, some years ago now, while trying to improve yourself by rotting your brain with words instead of the TV: Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourselffor nothing.
It’s there in the Neighbors, every smiling face, every off-key chorus: the ancient fear that if you let them fully wake you up, the light will burn out your eyes.
It’s here, in this box full of bones, and some little golden figurines Ricky gathered from the executive suite, and the tape you’d pulled from the projection room, his last recorded words.
The book had a little more to say than that:
“But you are a great sinner, that’s true,” he added almost solemnly, “and your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourselffor nothing. Isn’t that fearful? Isn’t it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at the same time you know yourself (you’ve only to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from anything?”
But you weren’t ready yet to hear it, not even the recommendation of throwing one’s self to the ocean rocks that came after.
But the book is right: there’s no pretending it was for anything. There’s no pretending that death leaves anything but a hole.
And you two bury Mr. Al under one of the benches, the one where a granite Norman sits waiting for someone to relax into his one-arm embrace, because the dirt is soft from the recent rains and you figure having a heavy bench on top of it will deter any of the Neighbors from trying to dig him up. How they would find out, you don’t know, but you can never be too careful with them, especially when the Lenard statue still likes to come alive at night.
Ricky sits on your shoulder, silent even as you grunt and struggle through pushing the statue aside, through digging up frost-frozen ground, through filling the hole back up with the side of your work boot. Before you move the statue back, you sit down on the bench, your feet carefully spaced to either side of the fresh gravesite, and lean back into the hard embrace of Norman’s outstretched arm.
Your breath comes out in wisps, but Ricky’s does not. “You okay?” he asks, his voice still a little hoarse, a little too small.
“Yeah, my back’s just killing me.”
“I think we have some ibuprofen in the hotel.”
“No, no,” you grip onto the bench and twist until you hear something pop, then do the same to the other side. A heavy sigh of strained relief. “It’s okay.”
A pause. Then: “Gordon?”
You look at Ricky from the corner of your eyes as his own stare unblinking, a light dusting of powdery snow beginning on their tops.
“How many times have you buried a body?” he asks.
You almost start to say, Well, depending on how much is left, but you simply gape like a dumb, dying fish. Recover by sucking in air through your teeth, then say instead, “Probably uh, five, five or so before this.”
Such forced casualness, like two old friends who haven’t spoken in years. Like you’re just talking about the weather. But why shouldn’t you? Those burials didn’t break you beyond the first; what broke you was when you had to leave the bodies behind. Or when there was nothing left to go in the ground.
But that was then. That was the old you, who lives inside your skin but can’t fit it without a belt and some buttons.
“Why?” you ask.
“Just wondering.”
You look back towards the ground and roll your shoulders, hearing a gravel crunch.
“You should see a chiropractor for that,” Ricky says.
“I’ll put it on my calendar.” You won’t.
Ricky adds, “I have one I can recommend to you.”
“Now what does a sock need a chiropractor for? You ain’t even got a spine.”
“Not for me, silly, for— never mind.”
“Let’s get this thing done with,” you say, forcing yourself to stand. A grunt of effort, a sigh. “Can’t decide if I want to just go to sleep after this or go get hammered.”
What sounds like a smirk creeps into Ricky’s voice. “What would you call it, an Irish wake?”
You look over at him. “Do you want to go to a pub? I can pay—”
But Ricky is already shaking his head. “I — I haven’t been off the studio grounds in so long — I’d get too anxious.”
“Okay, then,” you say. “Let’s go order some food and drinks, then, and you can tell me more about Mr. Al, if you want.” Truthfully, you’d rather not, but you know it’s what you’re supposed to say.
There’s something else you probably should say, but you don’t know what. Besides, when else is a man allowed to be drunk and to cry than when his father has died?
Oh, there is one thing:
“Any final thoughts before we go inside?”
“Can I sing something?”
“If we’re having an Irish wake, that’s practically a requirement.” And you force on your warmest smile, which probably still couldn’t warm a bagel.
Ricky smiles. “Alright, but you have to cry for me.” He focuses his eyes on some point off into the distance. “This isn’t a song Mr. Al wrote, but our friends Paul and Kenny wrote it for me for our first big film. Me and Mr. Al spent aaaages rehearsing it, and it’s… it’s still one of my favorites. Okay. Here I go.” A little cough, a little humming. Then:
Why are there so many
Songs about rainbows
And what's on the other side?...
You don’t cry, though you wipe some snowflakes from your eye, and realize halfway through the song that he’s staring at the office building, up where the executive suite would be.
It feels too soon to be a real goodbye. But you’ll let him have it.
xxii.
Ricky is a weepy drunk, to the surprise of no one.
xxiii.
A few days later, after not filming for a week, after thanking whoever above that the Neighbors edited something on Sunday to send to the Network, after telling the Network the next episode will be late due to “unforeseen complications,” you find Ricky in the hotel. Of course, you do. He hasn’t been avoiding you, but he hasn’t been going out of his way to find you, either.
Ready to get some food? You’d asked. His dad-not-dad’s funeral had delayed Ricky’s appetite to the then-unknown future of “maybe tomorrow.”
“Remind me to never give any of you my credit card information,” you say as Ricky slips your credit card from your wallet with his mouth.
“You say that like we’d need permission,” Ricky goes to push his nose into the hotel’s desk phone, but the size is woefully mismatched, and he smashes three in one go. Then three more.
“Hey, now,” you say, slipping the phone out from under his face. “Let me do it, then.”
There’s a forced cheer to his voice, a bone-deep weariness, but you don’t care to mention it. Let a man deal how he wants.
“The pizza place doesn’t sell beer, though, so I’ll have to go get some from the corner store,” you say as the dial tone drones. Ricky opens his mouth at the exact second you hear a voice, so you raise a finger to him instead.
Once you’ve placed the order, though, Ricky asks, “Can I go with you?”
You blink. “You sure?”
“Surer than the guy who sells Insurance on Sure Street.”
You hum quizzically, scratching your chin. “I’ve been screwed over by quite a few insurance agents…”
You slip your hand down to the table so that Ricky can climb back up.
“Can I just stay in your hood?” he asks, to which you reply that he’ll just be sitting in whatever snow collects there as you lower your arm to him.
“Pull it up, then, and I’ll wrap around your neck like a scarf,” and he’s doing so before he even finishes his sentence. “We once almost had a Neighborhood fashion show with a big boa made of tons of fake Rickys. Everyone said they looked like snakes.”
“Just don’t strangle me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
You feel the end of him at the left side of your neck, tucked into the fabric of your jacket.
As you approach the door, however, a Norman calls to you— “Wait up!”
Running towards you, tripping down the stairs, arms upward all the while. Wearing the same dark blue jacket as his Unfriendly doppelganger.
“Hey, Niles,” you sigh more than say, just from exhaustion.
“Niles?” Ricky asks.
The Norman stops in front of us, facing backwards, arms still waving like a used car lot’s mascot.
“And what are you wearing?” Ricky adds, practically spitting the words.
Niles spins around, that same smile now looking a little patronizing as he hooks both thumbs under his jacket’s collar and leans over. “A vintage denim jacket I found in the costume department.”
“Where in the costume department?”
“In the air vent. Took forever to get all the dust, and—" He turns his hips, showing the back of his jacket all spattered with blood, even over the eye. “Well, didn’t get all the red paint off.”
“You mean—” Ricky gives an exasperated sigh. “No, no, I’m not dealing with this right now.”
“I’ll throw a punctuation in there and bolt the vent cover back on the morning,” you say, reaching a hand up to hover almost protectively over the back of Ricky’s head.
“Nobody was in there, I’m telling you.”
“You sure, Niles?”
Ricky looks at you like you’ve grown another head. “Now where did Niles come from?”
“It’s short for Nihilistic Norman, ‘cuz he keeps telling me how nothing matters. He thinks it’s funny.”
Niles laughs, “And I keep telling him we’re all like this once you get to know us!”
Ricky looks at Niles, back to you, back to him. “Just as long as you keep it strictly off-camera.”
At the store, you grab a case of cheap beer and listen to Niles hum and inspect the whole candy aisle with his fingers.
“No cognac?” Ricky asks. Ricky had greeted the store clerk doing her homework and then settled into your shoulder, saying nothing.
“We can get some if you want, but we’d need to drive down to the big liquor store downtown.”
“It’s fine, then.”
“Listen,” you glance over at Niles and the annoyed clerk fiddling with her Walkman, pen hanging off her lip. “If you wanna do something, just us, I’m here.”
“No, no, it’s okay. It’s just— it’s — Okay, yeah, he abandoned us. I knew that already.”
You were talking about ditching Niles, but close enough.
“And he didn't want to leave either,” Ricky continues. “I knew that already, too. So what does it matter? He’s not coming back—” and here Ricky’s voice breaks. “Why do I care?” Then a loud, rough sniff. “Let’s not do this here.”
“Hey, hey,” you soothe, your petting motions hovering just an inch or two from his head. “‘Snothing wrong with having a heart, isn’t that one of the songs you wrote for the new season?”
Ricky looks down, but his timid voice sounds a little warmer. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“If we could just rationalize ourselves out of our problems, alcohol wouldn’t need to exist.” You close the cool plastic door and hold your bounty up to him. “So let’s count our blessings, too.”
“When did you get all this wisdom, O wise one?”
“I’m just repeating stuff I’ve heard in movies. Mind if I get some cigarettes before we go? Niles!”
The puppet pops his head over the furthermost aisle, a pair of sunglasses and a Santa hat perched on his head, tags dangling down to his nose.
“Put allathat away. We’re leaving.”
A loud groan of disappointment, but you just try not to roll your eyes.
You can almost hear the smirk in Ricky’s voice as he asks, “Really, you get all your charmingly off-putting remarks from movies?”
“My life’s been pretty boring, Rick,” you say as Niles runs towards you with a box in his hands and candy bars falling out of his pockets. “And if I copied the Neighbors’ way of speaking I’d be sent to the Funny Farm.”
You recall your father trying to cheer you up about being sent to get blown up by saying that it’ll expand your horizons, make you realize life is bigger than worrying about whether some Suzie from history class will say yes to your prom proposal. You’ll come back and see how big life can be and be ready to make it so.
But your life didn't get any bigger, it just got flat.
Oh well. Movies can pretty nice.
Niles stands before you, fingers nervously drumming along cardboard sides. The box he’s holding is a box of cheap Christmas lights.
“Go put that back,” you say. “And the candy.”
“What candy?” His jacket and jeans pockets are still bulging.
“Cut the nonsense. You’re on tape and there’s a trail of Twix bars leading back to the crime scene,” you reply. “Trust me, kid, you’re not cut out for prison.”
“Well, yes, I’m cut out of cloth.”
“5/10,” Ricky says. “Too obvious.”
That makes you laugh for the first time this whole night.
When you’ve purchased your liquor and patiently waited for Niles to finish putting back his —
“But it’s Christmas.”
“It’s the 5th.”—
—back the candy he’s misplaced, the cashier counting change for a chocolate bar, Ricky watches you throw the coins into your pocket and whispers, “Now let’s get out of here so I can have my dramatic breakdown in the comfort of my own room.”
You didn’t know he had an actual, dedicated room, but you’ll let that slide.
You shoulder open the door, cold air slapping you and pulling your eyes open.
Ricky makes a noise of shock, as though he can feel it too. Then he adds, “Maybe you can throw me in the shower so it looks like I cried.”
“Uh,” you say. “How about you use your own shower for that?”
“Oh, so our friendship means nothing to you?”
You almost hit him back with, It’s been a few days, shouldn’t you have had your big meltdown by now? But despite the cavalier nature of the conversation, you can’t tell whether that would be too far. So instead you simply form a harsh line with your lips, puppet-like yourself, and mime him talking with your free hand.
Behind you, Niles sniffs, choking on a sob as he peels open his chocolate bar. He cries out now in between loud, cartoony chomps on his candy: “The holiday spirit means nothing to him, either!”
“I thought nothing in life matters and we’re all going to die?”
“Okay?” another bite. “Doesn’t mean it has to be lame in the meantime.”
“He has a point,” Ricky chimes.
“Yeah, yeah, I hate fun, I know,” you snap. A few seconds of silence, you rub a hand across your gray, unshaven cheek. “Look,” you say, forcing your voice to be as even as it weary. “I’m just not a Christmas kind of guy.”
Niles asks, “But how are kids supposed to find your house without any lights on?”“That’s for Halloween,” Ricky answers.“How is Santa supposed to find your house without any lights on?”“He can send me my coal via snail mail like everyone else,” you quip back. If you said Santa wasn’t real, would they believe you? “Aside from the fact that he’s not real.” But Niles is talking over you: “And how often do you get mail from snails? Or anyone else for that matter?”
“Did you not hear what I said?”
“How do you know Santa’s not real?”
“I once was a mall Santa just to make a couple hundred extra dollars. Any kid that came with a list or a letter, we just threw it out at the end of the day.”
There’s silence.
“You all okay?” You ask.
“That’s pretty bad,” Ricky says.
“Oh, what? The kid’s not going to know!”
“We keep every letter we get from fans!” Niles says. “And eat them!”
“So they’ll be close to our hearts forever,” Ricky adds, a wistfulness in his voice.
“You mean your stomach.”
“And the love rises up into our hearts from a valve in our stomachs,” Ricky replies. “Don’t you know how puppet anatomy works?”
You can’t tell whether they’re just messing with you.
“Well,” you say, “it’s a good thing I don’t have any lights, then. The kids who get coal can warm their hearts knowing I spent Christmas sitting in the dark watching whatever’s trash ‘s on TV.”
Niles claps a hand onto your arm. “Oh, they probably—” He stops then, co*cks his head. “Well, they probably do, for like, five minutes.”
“I have to concur,” Ricky adds. “At the end of the day, they still got coal.”
“Do they even know you’re cooped up in the house all sad?’ Niles asks. “Are you sending them postcards? I LOVE postcards!”
“No, no,” you say, dropping the beer case into Nile’s hands and ignoring the surprised yelp he makes as he almost hits the ground. “That would make too much sense.”
xxiii.
One day, you find the Unfriendly in the costume department. His jacket is missing, as is his lower half.
You take a step back. “Did Norm do that?”
“f*ck off.” He raises his eyeless head and then lets it fall back down. After a few moments, he tries to crawl forward away, wincing at the polyester stuffing unceremoniously catching on the carpet.
“Need any help?”
“Eat sh*t, old man.”
You remember saying something like that to your father, once.
To make a long story short, you end up pulling him into your arms even as his hands bash your back and your face.
To make a short story long, you cradle him because you’d squatted down and tried to help and he shook you off, eventually dropping his head down and making these little weezy sounds that you make when you’re a creature without lungs to burn or eyes to cry, and you rub his back and he says, It just hurts all over, I just want it to stop but it never does, and you rub his back and his wrinkled white T-shirt and don’t pretend to have anything to say
and you reach up into his abdomen and grab his—
You won’t talk about how you’re supposed to get rid of the rest of them.
xxv.
The facts are these:
- The world is broken straight down the middle.
- The world is a person you’re still grieving, who never truly existed and who also still walks around with her face haphazardly stitched on. When it falls, everyone politely looks away while she hides horrors behind one pale hand, picks her face off the ground, and calmly dusts it off on the side of her pencil skirt.
- Sometime during the war, while you were moving bodies and bombing villages, a man who lived two hours outside your city drove an hour to the Pentagon and handed his infant daughter off to a passerby before he set himself on fire.
- There’s no pretending it was for anything.
- The other day, someone sent Lenard a letter, saying they were six years old and they thought Lenard was really cool because they both liked to sing and collecting cool stuff and were missing an eye.
xxvi.
I wish there was a better way to end this story. A cleaner way to tie all the loose ends, a straighter path to the other side. But there is no other side. All the lives we’ve lived linger inside us, sometimes asleep, sometimes stumbling around in the dark, knocking their knees on the sharp corners of the hallway table and cowering at the waltz of shadows.
Still, the show goes on. Gordon has only appeared in a handful of episodes, but the mail and the message boards say fans like his gruff, “tired dad” demeanor.
On the weekends, Gordon goes out with his old war friends. Every couple of weeks, they go down to the city’s food bank and spend three hours sorting soup cans and boxes of pasta noodles.
Gordon forgets about the interview.
When Ted’s granddaughters come, the day is bright and blue, and they all think it’s hilarious when a Junebug says the youngest one smells like strawberries and tries to fit her entire little head into her mouth.
“Ah, I’m just messin’ with ya!”
Gordon breathes a sigh of relief.
Fast-forward: High, happy voices. Ricky and Ted talking about how the Neighborhood could help out with a school supplies drive Ted’s old union buddies organize every year. The new buckets of sidewalk chalk Gordon had brought from the corner store spilled open, pale rainbows, new portraits.
And he wants to tell himself that this— the puppets, the show— will make up for all the terrible things he’s done, but he knows it won't. They're two separate things.
But wasting your life doesn't bring anyone else back, either.
Just put one foot in front of the other. Just draw a heart with the word “Mom” inside it on a Fred's arm as he grips a little hand for strength and Niles plays the trumpet, and feel the warmth of the sun across your shoulders.
